Pro-migration journalists insist Americans need more migrants because of the declining U.S. birth rates — but they also deliberately ignore the alternative economy-growing strategy of automation, Americans, and exports.
The growing claim that migrants are needed to replace Americans comes as polls show declining public support for the labor migration that has reduced wages, spiked housing, and imposed more chaotic diversity on Americans’ society.
President Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, spotlighted the flaw behind the claim that more migrants are needed for basic work in the United States, by telling a surprised New York Times journalist:
One of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mind-set of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants when we have [sidelined] seven million — just men, not even women, just men — who have completely dropped out of the labor force.
People say, “Well, Americans won’t do those jobs.” [But] Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages … they will just do those jobs at certain wages. Think about the perspective of an American company. I want them to go searching in their own country for their own [sidelined] citizens, sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, get them re-engaged in American society. We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers.
The New York Times journalist — London-born, Cuban-origin Lulu Garcia-Navarro — was shocked and tried to refute Vance’s call for the federal government to help sidelined Americans get construction jobs that would otherwise go to migrants.
I don’t think that many people who look into this agree with you. But about a third of the construction work force in this country is Hispanic. Of those, a large proportion are undocumented. So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working in construction?
But this journalist’s surprise at Vance’s preference for Americans reflects the conventional wisdom in elite D.C. circles, which insists that the economy can only be grown with more migrants — not by productive Americans and their high-tech machines.
“People in the media announcing their complete detachment from society is not new,” responded Jon Feere at the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
There’s no such thing as a job Americans won’t do, and when businesses can’t find a lawful resident to take a job, they have to consider raising wages, offering better benefits. That’s a good thing,
[Reporters] don’t understand the ways the labor force can adjust. They don’t understand that mechanization can fill a lot of these jobs that they think requires stoop labor.
When I hear people celebrating the ability to exploit cheap labor while attempting to project a pro-immigrant image, it’s one of the most gross, almost disgusting things I hear. They like the idea of creating a permanent underclass, they like the ability to exploit desperation.
“Of course, most of these newsrooms are owned by corporations that have an interest in an endless amount of exploitable foreign labor, and most journalists don’t have the freedom to write something that goes against corporate demands,” he added.
The Democrat Party’s leaders put migration before Americans.
“We got the lowest birth rate we’ve had in well over 100 years,” Bill Clinton told a media audience on October 14. “We’re not at replacement level, which means we got to have somebody come here if we want to keep growing the economy.”
“We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told a D.C. audience in November 2022. “The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the dreamers and all of them.”
“We look to the north, with Canada,” Cuban-born border chief Alejandro Mayorkas said in September. “Canada takes a look at its market needs, and it says, “You know what? We need 700,000 foreign workers to address our labor needs domestically.” And so they build a visa system for that year to address the current market condition.”
Mayorkas’s Canada-style, cheap labor policy is endorsed by Kamala Harris’s 2024 economic platform.
These pro-migration economic claims are driven by the Democratic Party’s self-serving desire for a greater population of poor migrants and by their consumer-economy donors’ rational desire for government-provided extra workers, customers, and renters.
However, the alternative strategy would ensure greater employment of sidelined Americans, greater workplace productivity via automation, and greater exports to foreign markets via mutual trade with countries that are now used as a source of cheap migrant labor.
The productivity-before-population strategy was pushed in April by Larry Fink, the founder of the $10 trillion Blackrock investment company:
“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” Fink said at a pro-globalist event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued:
That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …
If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations.
In contrast, countries with expanding populations need to focus on basic issues of education and the “rule of law,” said Fink, adding:
So for those countries that have rising populations, the answer will be education … [and] for those countries that do not have a foundation of rule of law, or education, that’s where the [economic] divide is going to get more and more extreme
Vance focused his argument on helping sidelined Americans get back to work when Garcia-Navarro insisted that there were no additional Americans who can join the construction industry. “Most people who don’t work can’t work in the regular economy — they’re in the military, they’re parents, they’re sick, they’re old, they might not want to work in construction,” said Garcia-Navarro.
“The unemployment rate does not count labor-force participation dropouts,” Vance schooled her.
Since Congress doubled the immigration numbers in 1990, the share of “prime age” men in jobs has fallen from roughly 93 percent to 88 percent in 2023. The share of men without four-year college degrees who are working jobs has dropped from 91 percent to roughly 84 percent. Nationwide, the drop adds up to five million non-working men.
The decline in the labor force participation rate among _prime-age_ (25-54) U.S.-born men is also most pronounced among the less-educated. Sources: Figures for 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990 are from the public-use decennial census, which is collected in April. Figures for 2000, 2006, 2019, and 2023 are from the April public-use CPS.
That pool of men is not being recruited by employers for a variety of reasons, chiefly, they are too troublesome and risky for employers to find, motivate, train, and keep.
But employers do not have to train those men when Mayorkas is bringing in roughly 3 million legal, quasi-legal, illegal, or tempory foreign people per year. That Mayorkas migration adds roughly 3 migrants for every four Americans born each year.
Since the pushback by Vance, pro-migration activists and journalists have kept up their demands pushing for more migration
Without migrants, “I don’t think there would be milk,” Pete Wiersma, the president of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, told a credulous columnist for the New York Times. But, writer Marcela Valdes admitted, “In the long run, more dairies might invest in robotic milkers if the price of milk rose high enough to justify the capital-intensive systems.”
Breitbart News has extensively covered the spreading use of labor-saving cow-milking robots and other labor-saving machines in the agriculture and meatpacking sectors.
So far, Democrats in Congress have not pushed for government loans to help farmers purchase more robots, but have instead tried to expand illegal farmwork into a pathway to citizenship.
Illegals comprise perhaps 50 percent of the construction labor force in Texas, so “cutting off the supply of undocumented workers, then, would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber,” claimed left-wing Jack Herrera at Texas Monthly. “Far fewer homes and businesses would be built in the next few decades,” he said as he quoted construction industry leaders who are lobbying for more cheap workers.
However, the vast inflow of disposable migrant workers has pushed millions of American professionals and their young replacements out of the sector. “It’s not easy to find a good worker, a loyal worker, for [the] long term,” Val Fomin, general contractor at Katz Design & Builders Inc., told Capitalandmain.com in October 204. “It is challenging. It’s almost like full-time work.”
So the construction industry has “stunningly bad productivity performance,” Barack Obama’s economic advisor Austan Goolsbee wrote in February 2023. He added:
Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s, both measures of construction sector productivity grew steadily. Indeed, they outpaced their whole-economy counterparts during that period. By 1970, however, the construction sector’s labor productivity and TFP had both begun to fall. This downturn was not temporary; the decline has continued for the past half century …. [But by 2020] measures of construction productivity had fallen below their 1950 values.
In Springfield, Ohio, employers welcome unskilled Haitian migrants into jobs that would otherwise go to fewer but better-paid Americans and their computer-controlled machines.
“We were having a real hard time with [American] people that would apply for a job and then they wouldn’t show up on the floor,” Pentaflex CEO Ross McGregor told two CNN.com pro-migration reporters.“Or they’d come in and they’d work for half a day and they’d just leave … You need to have a reliable workforce that you can count on to be at work every day.”
But hiring Haitians means fewer robots and their American operators. “Fewer robots get adopted in municipalities with a large share of migrant workers,” said a Danish study posted in December 2022. The study added: We find that a one percentage point increase in the share of non-Western migrants decreases the probability of robot adoption by 7% … Higher wages are positively associated with the value of robot imports.”
In the white-collar sector, C-suite executives prefer hiring disposable, compliant, and cheap visa workers — such as H-1B workers — instead of sharing profits and power with free-speaking American professionals.
Even when pro-migration journalists try to argue that migrants are good for American workers, they miss the importance of productivity and the Americans who have been pushed out of work. “The co-incidence of stagnating wages and rising immigration really does look like just that: a coincidence,” wrote author Roget Karma in The Atlantic — without mentioning automation, productivity, or sidelined Americans.
Yet the unpopular demotion of Americans and productivity by the establishment media is now helping President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.
NBC News reported: about a young American construction worker who is slow to quit his parent’s house because of high rents:
“Trump can run America like a business and Kamala would run it as a classroom,” Tasker told NBC News. “Trump would care about how Americans can get the most money, how we can care for the most people, and keep America first.”For David Tasker, an 18-year-old construction worker in Pennsylvania, his top financial priorities are having enough money for gas, dining out and spending on his girlfriend while living at home with his parents.
But he worries about the rising prices he’s seen during his teen years as he’s emerged into an economy experiencing decades-high inflation. For his first election, he said he will be voting for former President Donald Trump with those higher costs and concerns about the wider economy in mind.
